My work has shown that melancholic and grieving musics exhibit different structural characteristics, convey different emotions to listeners, and result in distinctive emotional experiences.

 

Samuel Barber

Adagio for Strings

John Williams

Schindler’s List, Theme

Tori Amos

Icicle

 

Sad music?

The above pieces have all been labeled by previous researchers as sad. But do these passages all express “sadness” in the same way? Do they result in the same emotional experiences in listeners?

Through a series of studies, I have shown that previous research has conflated at least two separable emotional states under the umbrella term sadness: melancholy and grief.

Listen to these two musical excerpts. While both might be deemed “sad,” the Mozart excerpt might be better described as melancholic, whereas the Barber excerpt might be better described as grieving.

Some of my findings:

1.

Melancholic music tends to be quieter, lower-in-pitch, and contains narrow pitch intervals. Grieving music tends to contain sustained tones, gliding pitches, and harsh timbres.

2.

Listeners perceive different emotions in melancholic and grieving music. This finding was replicated using a separate methodological design.

3.

Listeners feel different emotions when they listen to melancholic and grieving music. This finding was also replicated using a separate methodological design.

  • Grieving music tends to elicit feelings of Crying, Distress, Turmoil, Death, and Loss.

  • Melancholic music tends to elicit feelings of Sadness, Depression, Reflection, and Nostalgia.

 

An overview of my work on melancholic and grieving music.

 

More details about this work

I explored how the musical structure differed in melancholic and grieving music. The investigated features are shown below and are published in the Journal of New Music Research.

 

My work on experienced emotions, published in Music & Science, showed that:

  • People experience more mixed emotions to melancholic music than to tender music or grieving music.

  • People with different levels of empathy differ in their emotional responses to music—people with a higher level empathic concern experienced more positive emotions than others, but people with a higher level of personal distress reported feeling more negative emotions than others.